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Stiff Asks, Great Programmers Answer
Author’s note
This interview caught the world by surprise. A fairly unknown blogger in Poland, "Stiff", decided to contact some of his favorite people in the industry, asking them 10 podcast-like interview questions. This was in 2006, before iPhones and Cloud, back when Git was just a baby, and Go, TypeScript and Rust didn't exist. Stiff's idea was an audacious play for the time.
When Stiff mailed me the questions, he didn't indicate there was anyone else. So none of us knew there were others. Out of the ten he emailed, somehow nine of us replied: Linus Torvalds, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), Peter Norvig, Guido van Rossum, Dave Thomas (author), James Gosling, Tim Bray, Bjarne Stroustrup (belatedly), and myself. All of us answered all the questions, though with varying degrees of pzazz.
Stiff published it, and it went as viral as things possibly could back then in the carrier-pigeon days. Journalists everywhere slapped themselves for not having thought of Stiff's trick, since it was probably only going to work once.
What we got out of it is a small group portrait of some of the famous programmers in the class of 2006. We all owe Jarosław 'sztywny' Rzeszótko a pat on the back for putting this together.
AI Notes
The place to start now is question 4, where all nine were asked to name the next big thing in programming, and the 2006 answers grade themselves. Steve spends three paragraphs betting that web applications will eventually make every desktop GUI toolkit obsolete, with the caveat that an open-source browser has to win the market first via some killer app; Chrome was two years away. Norvig’s entire answer is “large-scale distributed processing.” And Linus, after arguing that Visual Basic did more for programming than object-oriented languages did, rules out any real revolution “until you start approaching real AI,” adding that real AI won’t be anything you will ever “program.”
The questions themselves are boilerplate, and half the panel visibly answers between other emails. Guido treats the whole exercise as light trolling, offering “being able to cook an egg for breakfast” as the most important skill a programmer can possess, and snowboarding as the technology he’d spend three months learning. Oddly, the casualness is what makes it work: with no interviewer in the room, a stock prompt turns into a personality test. Steve — flagged in the original intro as “probably the least known from guys here” — answers everything at length and in earnest, except the question of what makes one programmer ten times more productive than another, which he meets with two sentences that hand the reader a pair of hints and no answer. Both local copies, the verbatim Wayback dump and the stripped reading version, keep every typo intact.
Related listings
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2006
Get Famous By Not Programming
The backstory this page can’t carry, written from the inside. Three months before the English round-up went up, Steve had already blogged about Stiff’s email landing out of the blue, the absurdity of being called one of the “ten most famous programmers in the world,” why he figures he made the list (“I’m a damn loudmouth”), and the thesis it kicked loose — that programmers get famous by writing, not coding. Read it for what the questionnaire felt like to answer cold, with none of us knowing who else had been asked.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 103 more
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Good questions and great answers! Thanks fo doing this.
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“Steve Yegge:
Favorite anime OSTs: Last Exile, Haibane Renmei”Yay! Excellent taste, Steve. Last Exile (especially) and Haibane Renmei have some of the best OSTs out there, up there with great ones like FLCL or Ghost in the Shell or Cowboy Bebop.
(But boo on Tim Bray. I’m already reading a blog, I don’t want to hunt down a new one, and then hunt down within that one your musical tastes. That question didn’t require a very long answer.)
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I can’t believe you got all these answers.. well done!
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Sir,
I have a question for you: Is english becomming the language of interaction among those working in information technology?
Jim -
Are these real? :)
Thanks for the awesome post.
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That was an excellent interview….
:)
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Good interview. That’s a pretty good list of books I might look into.
“Linus Torvalds:
I’m actually not very much into music, but when I listen to it, I tend to listen to various classic-rockish things, ranging from Pink Floyd to the Beatles to Queen and The Who.”
Linus Torvalds is the man!
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That’s just awesome. I can’t believe no one before had this idea. I will bookmark this and study it excessively later´.
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Wonderful, Thanks.
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Why didn’t any of these people discuss the “metaverse”?
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Guido’s a moron.
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Great Read..interesting
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“Is english becomming the language of interaction among those working in information technology?”
yes, and it has been; according to Linus himself- “through Linux, I’ve been communicating professionally exclusively in English for the last ten years. In fact my English is stronger than my Finnish…”
http://www.enrus.ru/english/public_5.html -
If you say all comments need to be in English, why don’t you use English for your dates/categories/months/etc here on the blog. There’s nothing wrong with Polish, of course, but since you want all comments in English…
BTW, Great interview, you should do more of them!
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“Stardust” - Neil Gaiman
Wow, while everything was interesting, that was the most useful information for me;)
I love Gaiman! -
Before the interview this was a completely Polish weblog, so most page elements are in Polish, I didn’t yet decided what I will do with this. I want only comments in English here, because there is a separete entry with the interview translated to Polish, where my Polish folks can comment…
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GREAT INTERVIEW(s). Keep it up !! And i just loved Guido’s answer -
“Your questions are rather general and hard to answer. :-) I guess being able to cook an egg for breakfast is invaluable.”
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awesome interview! most interesting is the bit -
Steve Yegge: Great programmers learn how to program their tools, not just use them.
and just below…is Linus saying…
Linus: but I’ve obviously also written my own version control system (git), and the text editor I use (micro-emacs) I’ve ended up customizing and extending upon too
which confirms Linus really is the _man_ !
Pity that Bill G didn’t figure in your list :-(
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The concise answers from Guido provide the clear truth to why Python is king.
period.
Look at the rest of the utter gibberish. Learning to program from a classroom? Give me a break. This is second generation nonsense.
e.
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Norvig needs to get off his high chair and talk more. Not impressed.
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I find the GIMP invaluable, and also maddeningly unintuitive. I’ve been using it for years and can still barely do anything with it. - Steve Yegge
it’s sooooooo true.
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Ha!Linus wrote a lot for the questions….
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Great post, I’m looking foward to the rest
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Programming Pearls = Must read
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Top, top article. well done!
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What’s up with Peter Norwig with all those shitty answers?
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This was a great read! Thanks for publishing it.
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Steve Yegge is an ignoramus. “Nothing comes close to MySQL?” Get a fucking clue…
I can’t believe DHH likes such lame music.
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fdfd - Peter Norvig is an intellectually dishonest dickhead.
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If this thing is not real you’re very smart and at least made me think and laugh a lot! Thank you anyway!
The funniest quote: “Initially, I was self-taught. I got my first programming job before I went to college. But I’m glad I did. I had a lot of fun. I kept going until I had a PhD.”
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Guido Van Rossum
Plillip Glass is great, Naqoquatsi and the series is unbelieveable. -
ggssfgrhbjjhnm dvdhevdee h,ihthfjjb sxss wedcvtrrwgtbgtrqwunah fn4e vjhw3fhv fdeebz nsdthjy jghwcy bbrm enhq ok
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Thanks a lot to the people who took time out of their busy lives to answer some questions. I greatly enjoyed reading through them and was surprised by a few of the answers. Thanks again!
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What? No questions about their sex lives? ;)
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Maybe you can become an excellent journalist.
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Hello, I’ve translated it into Chinese, 中文版 http://club.phpe.net/index.php?act=ST&f=15&t=13863&s=
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“For example, I personally believe that „Visual Basic” did more for programming than „Object-Oriented Languages” did.” - Linus Torvalds
**** Linus Torvalds…. I’m a linux fan, but that’s just crap.
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@sztywny You’re right. I only read this post so I didn’t realise the entire site was in Polish. My bad. Keep up the good work man.
Here’s another idea, how about making it bilingual?
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After this entry generated more visits in two days than I’ve had in previous three months I’m seriously considering it, Daivd :D I just need to improve my English skills a bit first…
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Buena Entrevista !
La voy a traducir al español
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Good job man!
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Thanks for taking the time to come up with the questions and organizing the answers. Those are mostly the same questions I would probaby ask. As a personal preference, I tended to like the answers from James Gosling and Dave Thomas the best as I found them more insightful, but they were all great answers from everyone else too!
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hi there,
nice job. I’m glad that you got all the replies. More so that you posted ‘em.
Tim Bray : -1 on your music reply. I tried searching for music on his site and got more than 300 entries in the response
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=music&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google%2BSearch&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=tbray.orgthe reason that Joel Spolsky keeps trashing java was lost on me. But his latest post and the fact that Steve and Peter both emphasize on
SICP (mitpress.mit.edu/* sicp*/) which uses LISP makes things clearer now!It would be nice to ask the same questions to guys like Bill Gates, Steve Wozniack, Anders Hejlberg — I understand that these guys don’t have a popular blog. Do any of the readers here have any interest in these guys ?
BR,
~A -
i smell quzzila.com
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@OST:
The Last Exile OST is a very good soundtrack. But I think a similar but much better soundtrack is (the new) Battlestar Galactica OST! Mini-Sieries and Season 1. (I don’t have teh OST of Season 2. Is it out yet?)Futher (partially) superb sountracks are: Schlafes Bruder, Vanilla Sky, The Fifth Element, Orlando, Great Expectations and the title theme of Conan: The Riddle of Steel (it’s used in a Zelda comercial. I know it from there). Some of these movies are good, too. But othrs aren’t.
And game sountracks:
In my opinion Chrono Trigger and Zelda (Ocarina of Time) have very good soundtracks. The remixes of thouse are great, too: http://ocremix.org@Other music:
“Queen and The Who”
Yes they are great. I also like New Model Army, The Dresden Dolls, The White Stripes, Tori Amos, Björk, The Smiths (and Morrisey) and a bit Violent Femmes, Green Day, U2, Led Zepplin etc.Sorry if thats a bit off topic. :)
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Excellent idea. We can learn lot of good stuff from these great programmers. I did already.
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For the commentator__>> Guido’s a moron >>
Guido Van Rossum created the language more then a decade ago that is now being used by the Google & NASA engineers, besides everyone else, and also influenced the creation of Ruby. Calling him a moron does nothing but prove your level of intelligence…Otherwise, great interview and thanks a lot for sharing it with everyone…
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Wow! It seems Ruby and Emacs are da thing to learn. Yeah. Thanks!
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good interviews, well done mate.
but only one bit of it made me laugh out loud……Linus still using pine…..jezzzzzzzz :-))
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I like Guido. Nice, sarcastic european humor! :-)
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different brain strucure. Wow… who owns that ? :)
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nice interview, great work
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Thanks for asking these great questions! I myself have always wanted to ask them. Looking forward to others…
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What, none of the great hackers mentioned Microsoft .NET? Haha, just joking. Thanks for the cool interview. James Gosling sure stuck out: Emacs, Emacs, Emacs, Emacs, NetBeans!, Emacs… I’m surprised that any of these hackers first learned programming in school. And some of them read nonfiction books too. Sort of tones down my image of the stereotypical hacker. But not by much.
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great idea!
IMHO you miss Rob Pike [email protected] http://labs.google.com/people/r/
a true innovator ( http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/ , http://cm.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/plumb.html , http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf ), co-author of the very recommended “The Practice Of Programming” ( http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThePracticeOfProgramming ).here it is a list for a next round of interviews:
http://java.sys-con.com/read/47349.htm -
Alessandro - from the java.sys-con.com list I e-mailed Martin Fowler (he responded he hasn’t got enough time) and Roy Fielding (didn’t respond at all). There is a lot of people there I actually forgotten…
Well, Alan Turing would be certainly worth interviewing…
Btw, I got an answer from Bjarne Stroustrup recently, just added it here…
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That Guido boy really comes up as a great schmuck…
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may I suggest you to ask Joel Spolsky too? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
He was in the MS Excel team, a team that write their own C compiler!
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joelonsoftware.com%2Farticles%2Ffog0000000007.html -
I e-mailed Joel AFAIR, but he didn’t respond.
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Ok Stiff, I suggest you another guy: Alex Martelli, a Pythonian:
[email protected] http://www.aleax.it/
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/918 -
Wonder which distro Linus uses?
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>>I think it will mostly obsolete all other client-side toolkits: GTK, Java >>Swing/SWT, Qt, and of course all the platform-specific ones like >>Cocoa and Win32/MFC/etc
rotf, stfu
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Great questions with great answers from great people.
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Superb idea Stiff, you’ve made my day!
You might like to know that the latest Verity Stob column in The Register (http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/08/08/cplusplus_loops/) mentions Linus and links to this blog page, so expect a few more hits…
I was surprised by some of the answers, while others seem to show a pattern that reflects the age of the responder - especially those Emacs addicts :)
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Good interview. It was worth the read and you did a great job with the questions.
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Rumores de Linus y Visual Basic
Hay corriendo por el web una noticia basada en un comentario de Linus torvalds que sacado de su contexto parece decir: A Linus le gusta Visual Basic.
Esto fue lo que dijo Linus:
For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for progr… -
Just wondering if you’ll expand the list at some point — for e.g., perhaps ask Jamie Zawinski or Larry Wall or RMS? (Of course, assuming you haven’t already asked them and they just did not respond.)
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Great article! Very interesting and insightful.
I did think someone might have mentioned The Mythical Man Month as a computer related book though.
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http://aqduhk10.com aqduhk11 aqduhk12 [URL=’http://aqduhk13.com’ ]aqduhk13[/URL] aqduhk14 [URL=http://aqduhk15.com ]aqduhk15[/URL]
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Thank you Steve! Fantastic!
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All these people, бля, are great mans!
And I found that most important programming skill is individualityнах! -
Thanks - an excellent read.
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Very good interview.
Thanks for doing this.Pozdrawia Robert
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You forgot Larry Wall and Richard Stallman, two of the most important hackers of all time.
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Thanks for posting this! Definitely a great idea and pretty well executed. Keep ‘em coming, btw. ;)
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Awesome Interview. It made my day. I was looking for these kinda information in order to get inspired as well as know which direction should I head. It was clever of you to come up with the idea of interviewing them.
Cool!!! ;-)
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Great job!!! Will you include more interviews in the future? Are you planning to write a book?
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Great questions and answers (in most cases). Glad you took the time to query them and post the results.
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Excellent interviews, and some insightful answers. Thanks for sharing them!
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Did you forget about Richard Stallman?
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Dude, your English was fine! Nothing to worry about, and anyone that bugs you about should shut up and try to speak to you in *your* language, and then see how well they do :)
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http://www.evardsson.com/top/development/interviews.html
Interview with some of the biggestWhile there are a good deal of serious answers about tools, platforms, methods, skills and so forth, the gem that made me chuckle was the response from Guido Van Rossum to the question “What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?”:
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Drogi Jarku!
Great job!
This is really awesome.
I’d never expect that they read something else than technology stuff or even listen to music. ;-PI hope you don’t rest on one’s laurels and you prepare another interviews.
Cheers,
alienjrPS. Sorry for my bad english.
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“If you had three months to learn one relatively new technology, which one would You choose?”
GvR: SnowboardingOh God that’s so funny in a surreal / programmer humor sort of way. :-)
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It takes someone of the same level of intelligence in order to understand another person’s wit or sarcasm. For those insulting Guido, obviously you aren’t smart enough to understand his sense of humor. He’s not stupid by any means, but he *is* trying not to take himself too seriously. Humility is an important trait for any programmer, because without it, you’ll never be able to admit when you’ve made a mistake. Without having the maturity to do that, you never improve. (But of course arrogant programmers are a rarity, right?)
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Great questions, amazing responses… Most entertaining/enlightening blog post in recent memory… THANKS!
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I think that your warning about ” Comments not in english..” its an attempt to the principles of liberty of expression in the internet and its not a political correct form of being. It’s just my opinion. Iknow that you may want to everybody understands what in the blog is said it, but I think it’s not relevant.
Thanks..
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Did everyone you emailed reply?
Any chance you might try and get Larry Wall and the Woz to answer these questions?
…. and maybe bill gates while you’re at it..
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Guido shouldn’t have even bothered to respond; what a load of rubbish. Anyone can give smartass responses to questions and I’m glad that most of the others made good use of their time (and mine).
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Cool !!!
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Python never looked very exciting to me, but based purely on guido’s general coolness in that interview i’m gonna go check it out. Guido rocks.
-rjs.
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It was very interesting! Thank you for your interview
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I am missing Larry Wall (Perl)… Apart from that - nice interview
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Wow! Author and “Great programmers” thank You very much!
I want to make an emphasis on few moments I completely agreed
Dave Thomas:
… The real answer to that is „I’m still learning programming.” I think any good developer continues to learn throughout their careers…
James Gosling:
To be self motivated…
I understand the following Linus Torvalds idea: “… I personally believe that „Visual Basic” did more for programming than „Object-Oriented Languages” did…” - in sence that only simple (relatively) things can made fundamental changes. -
Very interesting read, great to hear what the industry experts think on the industry.
Thanks!
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It would be good if u can ask also the creator of Perl - Larry Wall (his email is : larry_at_wall.org)
thanx
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1. I emailed Larry Wall but he didn’t respond.
2. One person that answers I would really really like to see is Donald Knuth (as many other people judging from some of the comments), but one needs to write to him by postal email and wait six months for the answers like you can read on his webpage.
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Hey, good interview! I liked Steve, Linus and Stroustrup’s interviews best. Guido Van Rossum was particularly terse… must be his style :-) … music wise, I liked Linus best. The others are non-impressive. And I would like to thank Steve for his excellent recommendation of the book “SICP”.
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Very good work and thanks alot for posting this article. Its good to know what the big guys in our field have done in the past or do now.
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Very inspiring. I salute.
Startups.in/India
(Nag .B) -
Coooooooooooool!!!!!
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Norvig is what can be called a very very intelligent man. And if you look at it from a technical literature point of view, he stands close to the greatest computer scientist we know. So, i’d give him props for not answering personal and bullshit questions (like the last 2 ones).
That said, Guido have a strange sense of humor (i couldnt decide if he’s ironic or arrogant…).
Only one thing: ‘Stroustrup: The Dixie Chicks.’ that had me laughing hard!
nah
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Good qustion,and funny answer
很好的问题，很有趣的回答。
Wow, this is a great interview. Is it real?
— fdfd · 23 July 2006, 7:07 pm
Of course it’s real, ask Linus ;)
— sztywny · 23 July 2006, 7:07 pm
Of course its real
Linus
— Linus · 23 July 2006, 10:07 pm